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Bolin: Where Are The Great Basketball Movies?

The list of iconic sports films is replete with a lot of great movies. There’s just one missing ingredient.

The Natural, Rocky, Field of Dreams, Miracle, The Karate Kid, Seabiscuit, Remember the Titans are all films, whether making personal top 10s or not, that exist as iconic moving pictures in the minds of movie and sports aficionados.

There is the baseball story of Roy Hobbs, the father/son connection of yesterday, the true-to-life 1980 Winter Olympics, the bullied kid who finds friendship and honor from his mentor through martial arts, the wondrous race horse who captured America’s hearts and minds and the ragtag bunch of black and white kids who find togetherness on the football field.

There are no legendary basketball films.

Solid ones exist. Memorable ones exist. But not a one exists that is both.

Hoosiers, one might say. It’s incredibly memorable. It has uplifting moments, incredible turns by Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper and the Jimmy Chitwood character is truly unforgettable. But who can quote more than a line or two from the film? No, it isn’t supposed to be witty. But plenty of films without wit have pieces of dialogue forever etched in our minds. And that isn’t to say it’s not actually a better piece of art than Remember the Titans or The Karate Kid, either. But few younger than 20 have actually seen Hoosiers. Accordingly, it fails to live to the iconic status.

Few that age or slightly older, myself included, truly understood what Seabiscuit and the Miracle On Ice truly meant to a nation in need. We weren’t around. But we’ve seen the films and understand the majesty. Tobey Maguire, the star of the 2003 film about the race horse was Spider Man, for crying out loud. Kids watched simply because he was in it. Miracle remains a staple on non-network television almost 10 years after its released. They’re not rare movies to come across.

Hoosiers is.

That same younger generation enjoys Coach Carter, Love & Basketball and Glory Road. Yet no one over 30 who didn’t take their kids to see those movies has seen those. Disqualified.

Tick up a generation and Blue Chips, Basketball Diaries and White Men Can’t Jump are must-sees for the 30-50 aged crowd. As brilliant a film as Basketball Diaries is, as hilariously quotable as White Men Can’t Jump is, and as loud and tawdry as was Blue Chips, none are actually good enough. Disqualified.

And of course, there are those truly awful movies that hold a special place in our hearts. Lest we forget those cast asides in the the wasteland of 1990s, early 2000s basketball films: Eddie, The Sixth Man, Space Jam, Celtic Pride, Finding Forrester (if that can be called a basketball movie). Some well-liked, and all mediocre, at best, feature films.

Why hasn’t it been done? Let’s say, for example, Hoosiers did qualify. That’s one movie in a cavalcade of hundreds that stands the test of time. Every other mainstream sport has more than a single title that could otherwise be listed.

Thankfully those dreadful 15 or so years of Hollywood churning out scrap-iron piece and scrap-iron piece of junky basketball films are gone. It’s been three years, in fact, since a mainstream film about basketball has made its way to the Silver Screen (2010’s “Just Wright”). It would, however, be nice to see someone with both the chutzpah and talent to make one that rivals the maybe of Hoosiers.